2021 Q1 Hyperledger Avalon

Created by Eugene Yarmosh, last modified by Arun S M on Apr 29, 2021

Prepared by Eugene (Yevgeniy) Yarmosh

Project

Hyperledger Avalon

Project Health

The project health is good. The team made a significant progress, particularly, finalizing functionality related to SGX DCAP attestation and scalable key management isolation from the workload execution. T-Systems engineers demonstrated an integration of SGX based Scone runtime with Avalon.

Divya Taori became a new project maintainer. T-Systems and Kaleido developers are planning to become project maintainers in Q2 2021.

LF Analytics for Q4  

Required Information

  1. Have you switched from master to main in all your repos ? Not yet, planned for Q2/2021
  2. Have you implemented repolinter.json in all your repos ?  Not yet, planned for Q2/2021

Questions/Issues for the TSC

There are no issues for the TSC currently.

Releases

Last release was done in July 2020. No new releases have been done during 2021 Q1.

The team has made a significant progress finalizing key functionality that addresses new SGX capabilities and key usages and is on-track to have a new release within following two quarters. 

Overall Activity in the Past Quarter

The project development was focused on the following areas

  • Completion of the worker pool implementation
  • Finalize DCAP attestation support
  • Key management enclave replication (final part of the worker pool scalability design)
  • Secure cross-worker (Graphene) communication channel
  • Multi-threading support for the key management enclave
  • Multi-tenancy (dedicated worker instances per requester)
  • Improved Python SDK as a separate subproject

Avalon team participated in the following activities:

  • Continued regular Avalon Technical Forum calls with a good community participation   
  • Presented Hyperledger Avalon at Kaleido Tech Tuesday Webinar
  • Continuously utilized email and rocket chat for community support

Number of Avalon presentations at the industry forums has been relatively low during last two quarters and this is clearly an area th”at requires a lot of attention.

Current Plans

The team is working towards release 0.7 that includes

  • Scone runtime integration (including documentation and samples)
  • Finalizing functionality by addressing corner cases
  • Integration with K8S with emphasis on end-to-end ease of use
  • Updating documentation, tutorials and examples
  • Improving test coverage and CI
  • Switch from master to main branch and Implement repolinter.json in all Avalon repositories

The team needs to identify more suitable industry events for a broader project enabling. 

Maintainer Diversity

We welcome Swati Kasera from Wipro as a new project maintainer. Kaleido is planning to become a project maintainer and bring their cloud-native manageability expertise for blockchain and confidential computing services. T-Systems is also considering joining Avalon project as a maintainer with focus on Scone integration.   

Contributor Diversity

Contributor diversity is gradually improving. We see an interest from Kaleido and contributions from T-Systems.

Additional Information

None at this time.

Reviewed By

Comments:

The following sentence isn't finished: "Number of Avalon presentations at the industry forums has been relatively low during last two quarters and this is clearly an area that requires a lot of a"

Why are you having these really long release cycles? Last release was July 2020 and you expect the next one to be in 2 quarters? That's over a year in between. Shouldn't you aim at a more regular cadence?

We are requesting projects to link to their Insights dashboard for the last quarter. So for this report you should have something like this:

https://insights.lfx.linuxfoundation.org/projects/hyperledger%2Favalon/dashboard?time=%7B%22from%22:%222020-12-31T23:00:00.000Z%22,%22type%22:%22absolute%22,%22to%22:%222021-03-31T22:00:00.000Z%22%7D

Posted by lehors at Apr 07, 2021 06:50

Arnaud, thank you for the feedback. The sentence is fixed and an analytics link is added.

The gap between releases is partially due to nature of the capabilities the team is working on, but also a side effect of our plans to split the project into two parts - blockchain focused and confidential computing focused. The planning have taken longer time than expected, but we are on the path to complete it in Q2.

Posted by EugeneYYY at Apr 07, 2021 16:14